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If there wasn't a huge scandal brewing and possible jail time in the cards....she would of finished her term and ran on the national stage, period!

She's an attention whore and likes money. No different than the average politician. The money politicians can make now is bigger than it ever has been. When I was a kid a US Congressman was a personal friend of my dad's. The guy was middle class. We stayed at their home in the Washington DC area when we were back there seeing all the historical sites on a family trip. Nothing fancy and when the guy was done serving in public office he went back home and ran his agricultural businesses. Now these guys make big money and live in some pretty nice homes. It's all the lobby money.

It used to be that former presidents would just disappear. Since Georg H.W. Bush they become multi millionares selling their influence. I mean Clinton has made a shit load of money because Bush showed him how to play the game. Many people don't know it but Bill Clinton was in on the Iran Contra thing by allowing the drugs to fly into Arkansas un harrassed. The Bush CIA was always running drugs and still do. Bill was on the take and played the game. They were always friends.

The problem now is almost every politician is a life timer. They are just there to make as much money as possible. They only serve themselves.

The national debt is likely to balloon under tax policies championed by three of the four major Republican candidates for president, according to an independent analysis of tax and spending proposals so far offered by the candidates.

The lone exception is Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who would pair a big reduction in tax rates with even bigger cuts in government services, slicing about $2 trillion from future borrowing.

According to the report — set for release Thursday by U.S. Budget Watch, a project of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former House speaker Newt Gingrich would do the most damage to the nation’s finances, offering tax and spending policies likely to require trillions of dollars in fresh borrowing.

Both men have proposed to sharply cut taxes but have not identified spending cuts sufficient to make up for the lost cash, the report said. By 2021, the debt would rise by about $4.5 trillion under Santorum’s policies and by about $7 trillion under those advocated by Gingrich, pushing the portion of the debt held by outside investors to well over 100 percent of the nation’s economy.

The red ink would gush less heavily under former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the report said — at least under earlier Romney proposals that paired $1.35 trillion in tax cuts with $1.2 trillion in spending reductions and would leave the debt rising on a trajectory that closely tracks current policies.

But that probably changed Wednesday, when Romney tacked to the right and proposed to cut federal income tax rates by an additional 20 percent for all earners — an idea that could easily slash federal revenues by another $3.5 trillion over the next decade, said Edward Kleinbard, a University of Southern California law professor and former chief tax analyst for Congress.

In a late-night addendum Wednesday, analysts for U.S. Budget Watch set a slightly lower price for the new tax provisions, suggesting that Romney’s entire budget framework would add about $2.6 trillion to the debt by 2021.

Only Paul emerged as a fiscal conservative in the report. His policies would cut tax revenues by more than $5 trillion over the next decade, the report said, but the revenue loss would be offset by more than $7 trillion in spending cuts, including deep reductions in defense and federal health programs.

The report marks the first independent attempt to gauge the overall impact of policies proposed by the GOP candidates on the nation’s $15.4 trillion debt.

“As we enter the thick of the campaign season, no one can ignore the debt issue,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which works actively to support debt-reduction efforts in Washington. “This report is designed to inform the public on the fiscal policies put forward by each of the Republican candidates and stimulate debate on this crucial topic.”

The report does not include an analysis of President Obama’s latest budget request, which claims to reduce borrowing by $3 trillion over the next decade. The group plans to do its own analysis of Obama’s request in a future report. The group said it also plans to update the GOP proposals as they evolve and add details.

The report does not seek to offer support to any candidate, and its authors have gone to great lengths to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. For example, the report offers three scenarios for each candidate: a “low-debt scenario” based on the most generous assumptions about vague changes in policy and a “high-debt scenario” that gives credit only for specific policy proposals.

The numbers cited above are taken from the report’s “intermediate-debt scenario,” which “gives credit for non-specified changes to certain part of the budget (for example, reducing non-defense discretionary spending by a percentage)” even if the candidate has not identified specific policy changes.

Santorum campaign suggests Mitt Romney may have done deal to make Ron Paul his running mate
After tonight's debate, in which Ron Paul and Mitt Romney repeatedly attacked Rick Santorum over his 16-year record in Congress, the former US Senator for Pennsylvania hinted that something nefarious was going on.

"You have to ask Congressman Paul and Governor Romney what they've got going together," Santorum told reporters in the spin room in Mesa, Arizona. "Their commercials look a lot alike and so do their attacks."

Santorum's top strategist John Brabender went even further, charging that the two men had "joined forces" and were coordinating attacks against his man

"Clearly there's a tag team strategy between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. For all I know, Mitt Romney might be considering Ron Paul as his running mate. Clearly there is now an alliance between those two and you saw that certainly in the debate."

2012 Republican ticket? Ron Paul and Mitt Romney

The was also coordination in their attack ads, he charged. "Ron Paul for all practical purposes has pulled out of Michigan. Correct? Where's he running negative ads against Rick Santorum? Michigan.

"It was interesting to me that if you watch Ron Paul when he came into the debate, he wrote negative things about Rick Santorum down because when he started to get questions he would immediately pick up his paper and start mentioning Santorum stuff."

He added: "What is amazing to me this shows a remarkable ability by Romney, who has already proven to be the most negative man in history on TV, now he's even training his opponents to be negative for his benefit and actually I think that takes remarkable skill."

The Romney campaign ridiculed the notion there was any coordination. "If ever there was an iconoclast who got up there and said what he believed, it's Ron Paul," said Stuart Stevens, Romney's chief strategist.

"The President of the United States's political action committee is now running ads that are just like Rick Santorum's. Is Rick Santorum coordinating with the President of the United States? I don't think so.

"So I think that's a sort of whiney silliness. It would not even be a question if he [Santorum] felt that he'd answered these questions better.

"To say, 'People are ganging up on me' in a debate where there's only four people in the debate and they're raising questions kind of speaks for itself."

MORNING UPDATE:

As many commenters point out, a much more plausible scenario than a Romney-Paul ticket would be some kind of future role for Senator Rand Paul. Or it could simply be that Ron Paul, knowing he cannot win the nomination, is positioning himself for maximum influence at the Tampa convention - he's all about furthering the cause of his movement rather than personal advancement.

I was on the Scott Hennen Show this morning talking about this and Scott drew my attention to Ron Paul's apearance on the show on February 7th in which he addressed this issue on the back of a Washington Post story about a "strategic alliance" between the two candidates.

Paul's denial was not exactly definitive. "Not exactly, I mean I never sat down with Mitt and said 'Well let’s do this or that'," he said. "There’s no doubt that he’s been more of a gentleman when I talk to him. It’s never been in my interest to go after him. Everyone else was doing that.

"Matter of fact, I don’t even like that part of politics. But then on the other side of this, we did some ads where we called him a flip flopper, and things like that. There’s nothing strategic. There’s been no decision. The staffs have talked to each other on some of the things like debates – and which debates we should go to – I don’t know how many things we have a strong agreement on.

"Our foreign policies are different - he certainly is not attacking the Federal Reserve – and his record up in Massachusetts wasn’t anything I could get too enthusiastic about, but I would say that the most important thing is that he’s someone I could talk to. I sort of like that approach in everything I do."

Through the first four contests in the GOP presidential race, there were more than 20 debates. For the next 14 contests (at least), there will be only one debate.

That debate was held Wednesday night in Arizona, and its impact on the GOP presidential race will become clear in the days ahead.

Here’s our snapshot of the debate, presented as usual in the form of winners and losers:

WINNERS

* Ron Paul: Who knew the Texas congressman was such an attack dog? While we’ve seen flashes of it in previous debates, he really went after Rick Santorum on Wednesday and got himself plenty of camera time in the process.

The takeaway if you were seeing Paul for the first time: ‘I’m not a politician like these guys. I’m principled.’ He used Santorum as a counter-balance in that effort, and it worked.

* Mitt Romney: It wasn’t his strongest performance, but he did what he had to do for the here-and-now — knock Santorum down a few pegs.

Romney’s performance isn’t likely to re-inspire confidence in his frontrunner status, which is probably more his long-term concern. But he bought himself time to work on that, at the very least, by stunting Santorum’s momentum.

* Debates: This might have been the last debate of the 2012 GOP presidential race, but even if it was, it’s been a very good year for debates generally.

The Republican race has turned several times thanks to the results of these debates, and despite some questions about the enthusiasm for the GOP canddiates, there was unprecedented enthusiasm for the debates, which drew record TV audiences.

There may be a call for fewer debates four years from now, but if anything, 2012 makes a strong case for more debates.

LOSERS

* Rick Santorum: For a guy who finally gained frontrunner status after a long haul, he didn’t handle it very well on the debate stage. As we noted Wednesday night, many of his counterpunches were difficult to follow and went way too far into the weeds.

“I didn’t follow all of that,” Romney said after Santorum spent a while explaining the earmarking process.

Neither did the audience and most voters, which was Santorum’s problem.

* Arlen Specter: This guy didn’t exactly have a great end to his political career, and now his name is again being dragged through the mud in a GOP presidential primary.

It continues to surprise The Fix how much vitriol there is for Santorum’s eight-year-old endorsement of Specter in the 2004 Senate race. But it’s a real thing in conservative circles, and Romney was smart to broach it.

* Congress: Want to know more about the earmarking process? Just watch a replay of Wednesday night’s debate.

What’s that? You don’t want to know more about earmarks? Of course you don’t.

Some of Santorum’s weakest moments came when he tried to justify his actions by pointing to how Congress works. The problem is that people don’t think Congress works, period. Paul took advantage of this; Santorum did not.

* Arizona: Besides a question or two about immigration, was there any indication that this debate was in Arizona?

Generally, these debates will include a good amount of local flavor. Poor Arizona broke the Republican Party rules by moving its primary into February and got its own debate — only to see the debate focus more on the other state holding its primary the same day as Arizona, Michigan.

Barbour says somebody else could still run: Haley Barbour, who is about as close to a Republican Party sage as they come, says it’s reasonable to think another candidate might yet get in the GOP presidential race.

“If the Republican primary voters continue to split up their votes in such a way that nobody is close to having a majority, then there is a chance that somebody else might get in,” Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and former RNC chairman, told ABC News.

Barbour said that such a scenario is unlikely, but that it’s increasingly possible. He also said it’s possible that the GOP nominee won’t be known by the time of the GOP convention, but he said that might not be a bad thing.

“It is not accurate to say that a hotly contested convention is necessarily bad,” Barbour said. “I am not saying it is necessarily good, but I don’t think it is accurate to say it is necessarily bad. Let’s just see.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who has also broached the idea of an open convention, says Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) is the only GOP candidate who could enter the race late and compete. But he added that Daniels’s wife is against him running for president and would probably prevent it.

Well, the GOP race has now devolved even further.....didn't think that was possible....now it's turned into a Survivor Island reality TV show

Will the alliance be strong enough between Ron and Mitt to last or is Mitt going to turn his back and forge a new alliance with Frothy? Choices are being made and the drama is only beginning....tune in tomorrow to see who gets voted off the Island!

Ron Paul quietly amassing an army of delegates while GOP frontrunners spar
Paul's tightly-organised campaign is racking up delegates even in states where he did poorly in the popular vote. It's all part of a complex system that could make Paul the election kingmaker

Ron Paul shakes hands with some of his young supporters at Twin Falls Senior High School in Idaho. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
While the Republican nomination race is focused on the ongoing battle between frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, the Ron Paul campaign is waging an under-the-radar "delegate strategy" that could make the libertarian-leaning Texan the surprise kingmaker of the race.

In states that have already voted via a caucus system – rather than a straight primary ballot – Ron Paul supporters are conducting an intensively organised ground effort aimed at securing as many convention delegate slots as possible, often in numbers that far outweigh the number of actual votes that Paul got in the ballot.

If successful, it means Paul's campaign could arrive at the August Tampa convention at the head of an army of delegates far larger than the proportion of votes that it won during the nomination contest.

It could also increase the chances of a contested convention – where no candidate has enough delegates to declare the winner – as well as give Paul much greater ability to inject his beliefs into the Republicans' 2012 policy platform.

The strategy is based on the fact the GOP race is in fact a "delegate contest" despite an overwhelming focus by the media and most campaigns on "winning" individual states by coming top of the popular vote. But in reality, each state, weighted proportionally by population, sends a number of delegates to Tampa where a nominee is then chosen.

A total of 2,286 delegates are sent to Tampa and so a candidate must secure the support of 1,144 of them in order to win the nomination.

However, a bewilderingly complex set of rules, often varying from state to state, exists to actually assign these delegates. Ron Paul's campaign is seeking to work that system in order to maximise its delegate count.

So far signs are that the campaign is being so successful at its strategy that it may be able to "win" delegate counts in states where it did not win the popular vote.

"They will be able to perform well enough that in some states where they came in third or fourth in the straw poll, they will come in first or second in terms of the delegate totals. I am fairly confident in making that bet," said Professor Josh Putnam, a political scientist at Davidson College who runs the Frontloading HQ blog dedicated to tracking the delegate fight.

How the strategy works

The strategy works because of the varying ways each state assigns the delegates that get sent to Tampa. Some states hold a "winner takes all" primary that will assign all its delegates to the candidate who tops the vote.

Others assign delegates proportionally according to the vote, splitting the delegates roughly according to the results and ensuring each major candidate gets some delegates.

But it is in the caucus states that the Ron Paul campaign is focused. There the method of assigning delegates is complex and lasts a long time. In caucus states that have voted so far like Iowa, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota and Maine, the process of assigning delegates in support of each candidate has barely begun.

That process begins on caucus night when each precinct votes and then chooses delegates to send to a county convention to be held later in the year. Those county conventions will then choose a smaller number of delegates to send to a state convention or conventions held in each state's congressional districts.

Those state and district level conventions are the bodies that actually finally choose which delegates to send to the Tampa national convention.

However, at the start of the process – the precinct level meetings held on caucus day – the delegates selected to go to the later county conventions are frequently under no obligation to declare which candidate they are supporting or to support the "winner" of the day's actual voting.

Ron Paul's campaign strategy is to get enough of his precinct-level supporters to volunteer to become delegates to the county conventions so that they outnumber other campaigns. "Their strategy is to gobble up as many of these slots as they can," said Putnam.

Then, if you manage to stack the beginning of the process with Ron Paul delegates, as the system moves through the county conventions and the district and state-wide conventions the chances of Ron Paul-supporting delegates emerging at the end and being chosen to go to Tampa is greatly increased.

The entire strategy is helped by the fact that Paul's supporters are seen as far more organised and dedicated than other campaigns.

Is it successful?

It is currently impossible to say. No caucus state that has already voted has yet held any county conventions at which an idea of the number of Ron Paul-supporting delegates chosen at the precinct level may emerge. Those first indications should come in March.

However, the Ron Paul campaign itself, which is at pains to point out their strategy is entirely within the rules, has released information from Colorado that shows how they hope it could be playing out.

In one precinct in Larimer County there were 13 delegate slots available. Santorum had won the precinct's vote by 23 votes to Paul's 13, with five votes going to Romney. But Paul supporters took all the delegate slots.

In a Delta County precinct all five delegate slots went to Paul supporters though he came behind Santorum and Romney in the popular vote. In a Pueblo County precinct Paul supporters got the two delegate slots available despite the fact Paul finished fourth in the precinct's vote with just two actual votes.

Those examples are likely cherry-picked by the Paul campaign as best case scenarios. But Colorado party officials are – officially, at least – sanguine about what is going on as it obeys the party rules. "We are just here to play out the process. Whatever happens happens," executive director of the Colorado GOP Chuck Poplstein told the Guardian.

But Poplstein did say a successful delegate strategy was not easy to pull off. "It is difficult for any campaign. You have to be very well organised and in all of the counties. It is not an easy process. You have to have a very good ground game," he said.

But that might not be too much of a problem. The Ron Paul campaign is highly organised and focused. "We are also seeing the same trends in Minnesota, Nevada and Iowa, and in Missouri as well," the campaign said in its statement on the precinct performances in Colorado.

A recent report by the Washington Post from a caucus in Portland, Maine, revealed a dedicated activist organisation complete with pre-printed lists of which delegates should be voted for at the precinct level. That is likely true across all the caucus states.

"They do tend to be very organised and very enthusiastic for Ron Paul," said Professor Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa.

What impact could it have?

The fact is that Paul's delegate strategy would have little impact in a normal Republican race. The system is set up with enough winner-take-all and primary states to ensure that Paul's strategy has no chance whatsoever of picking up enough delegates via this method to actually win the nomination himself.

But it all changes when the Republican race becomes protracted and closely fought. If Santorum, Romney and Newt Gingrich all stay in the race beyond Super Tuesday and start to amass their own large piles of delegates, then reaching the vital 1,144 delegates needed to win starts to become more difficult.

If that scenario plays out – something most experts see as possible but unlikely – then Paul's delegate total becomes crucial. He could become a kingmaker, agreeing to throw his hefty delegate total behind one candidate who could then claim victory.

As a candidate with a very clearly defined agenda – on foreign policy, the role of government and fiscal issues, especially the Federal Reserve – Paul could demand a high policy price for that support.

However, even if a nominee emerges prior to the convention, Paul's delegates will still be important. If he amasses a loyal and large delegate total he will able to secure a high-profile, possibly primetime, speaking slot.

He will also be more able to get his agenda into the party's official policy platform. Given Paul's stance on issues like American foreign policy and the wars in Afghanistan, that could upset the party elite and the nominee.

Modern conventions are supposed to be highly organised, tightly controlled displays of party unity. At the very least a successful Paul delegate strategy could shatter that prospect.

Here's one thing that most Americans don't realize about oil/gas prices....it's the criminal oil speculators who rig the prices

How The Gas Prices Are Manipulated By The Koch Brothers And Other Wall Street Players

Why are gas prices surging to levels unseen since the 2008 oil spike while the oil companies reporting record profits? Much of the problem is actually created by Wall Street traders here in the USA who gamble on oil prices and powerful multinational companies that manipulate the supply and demand by stockpiling oil when the price is low and expected to rise in the near future. And yes, so far this practice is perfectly legal.

Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that regulates commodity futures and option trading in the United States, says a very few number of players control too much of the market, allowing them to push the price of gas higher and higher. The American public knows very little about the oil speculation industry because a conservative majority on the CFTC has refused to implement the mandates from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to curb abuses and provide transparency

I think what the chart is showing is that the value of oil stays relative to the value of gold, whereas both are valued wildly different from the dollar (most likely a chart of "value" of gold in dollars would show similarly wild swings)

I get that but even on a gold standard oil speculation has dramatically skewed the game to the point where the price of gold isn't really a factor anymore.

Meaning...that oil prices are no longer dictated by demand, it's rigged now.....you have speculators buying oil cheap and falsely creating a demand that isn't there and when the standard of... demand = rising oil prices.... is no longer a true standard, regardless of the dollar or gold's value.

You can't have an accurate benchmark because they have created a false demand.

If we got paid in gold/silver coins, we could still invest it. It would be money, just like dollars are today. The difference would be ... the federal reserve couldn't just invent more of it out of thin air.

I get that but even on a gold standard oil speculation has dramatically skewed the game to the point where the price of gold isn't really a factor anymore.

Meaning...that oil prices are no longer dictated by demand, it's rigged now.....you have speculators buying oil cheap and falsely creating a demand that isn't there and when the standard of... demand = rising oil prices.... is no longer a true standard, regardless of the dollar or gold's value.

You can't have an accurate benchmark because they have created a false demand.

If you can keep the actual supply a secret then you can manipulate prices on anything.

If we got paid in gold/silver coins, we could still invest it. It would be money, just like dollars are today. The difference would be ... the federal reserve couldn't just invent more of it out of thin air.

A paper financial system is only as good as the people running it. Notes and bonds are nothing more than a IOU. When people don't get their money back they get reluctant to continue to use the system. They are going to want something real so this is where your gold and silver coins come in. We might go back to that if the high level of corruption in the financial system continues. The actual economy is real stuff and real services. The paper is just paper and it only works if you can actually at the end of the day get something real out of it.

Rand Paul was being interviewed on a local radio program and he said his father and Mitt have nothing going together. Of course the program host is very pro Romney and was alluding to Ron Paul being Mitt's running mate. These establishment repukes are still trying to make us think Ron Paul can't win. Rand said his father's campaign is still going very well and said the name of the game is delegates and not straw polls or media time. Santorum just continues to make himself look stupid by saying stuff that isn't true.

If we got paid in gold/silver coins, we could still invest it. It would be money, just like dollars are today. The difference would be ... the federal reserve couldn't just invent more of it out of thin air.

Sheer fantasy. Most actual economists without an irrational ideological bent will tell you a return to the Gold Standard is not only silly as there isn't enough gold in the world to actually do it, it would throw the economy into chaos...